Visions of Delight, Visions of Horror: Technology and the Cultural Imagination of the 20th Century (Post 1)

So, last summer I was lucky enough to be able to create and teach a science fiction class at Case Western Reserve University. The title of the class was "Visions of Delight, Visions of Horror: Technology and the Cultural Imagination of the 20th Century." Here is the course description:

Since the Swing Riots of the 1830s, when rural English farmers destroyed the threshing machines that were making their labor obsolete, many thinkers and artists have noticed how we are both amazed by and horrified of the technologies that we have produced to expand and develop human potential. From fears of robot uprisings, misanthropic supercomputers, to hopes of immortality through digital reincarnation, technology as it has emerged in cultural discourses like film, art, literature, music and television has been inflected in a diversity of ways, as messianic, horrifying, beautiful, and perverse. This seminar will probe this intriguing ambivalence by looking at a variety of cultural texts that enunciate this tension, and it will do so in the service of making its participants more critically aware of how our technologically accelerating moment is calibrating and perhaps revolutionizing the way we construct identities, delimit our organic bodies, define our sexualities, and negotiate and reconcile our religious convictions.

In grasping for the above goal, seminar participants will analyze foundational literary texts that negotiate the above themes, namely Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and H.G. Wells's The Time Machine. Participants will also consider important foundational texts in the coordinate filmic tradition associated with these issues, e.g. Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Participants will also listen to and discuss musical texts that deal with the themes outlined above, namely Daft Punk's Human After All and Connor Oberst's Digital Ash in a Digital Urn. Participants will also read and discuss non-fictional texts that treat the above described concerns, namely Katherine Hayles How We Became Posthuman and Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Participants will also consider how television texts like Gene Roddenberry's original Star Trek series and Rod Sterling's The Twilight Zone symptomatize historically determined assessments of technology's steadily expanding infiltration of daily life.

Let me be upfront: teaching the class was an amazing experience. Some of conversations we had in that class--about Cylons and Replicants and Androids--are the reasons why I got into academic world in the first place.

A lot ideas came out of that class that--not hyperbole--revolutionized my understanding of technology's role in science fiction. It was propitious, of course, that I had a class of about 20 geniuses helping me along the way.

Anyhow...

I'm going to be blogging about the themes addressed in that class. My goal is to revisit the texts we touched on in order to get down some thoughts on them.

And I'd be happy if you joined me along the way!

Metablog Comment: As with my other series (e.g. extended review of the anthology Swords and Dark Magic, The Weird History of the Novel, and The Rogue and the Merchant Pulp Novel Project) these posts will be semi-regular. Why all the post series? I like having series to return to because sometimes "my thoughts make more sense" when I fit them into an overarching framework.